Less than 20 percent of eligible voters living abroad have cast ballots in the presidential runoff, the Foreign Ministry said based on estimates received from its operations department Tuesday.
Approximately 100,000 of the 586,000 Egyptian expatriates registered have voted in the poll between Mohamed Morsy and Ahmed Shafiq.
The vast majority — 80 percent — of those who have cast ballots at consulates and embassies abroad are based in Arab countries, ministry spokesperson Amr Roshdy said on Wednesday.
As in the first round held last month, the Egyptian Embassy in Kuwait City received the most ballots, with 27,678, or more than a quarter of the votes cast in all cities. Riyadh, Jeddah, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Muscat followed in that order. With 2,012 votes, the consulate in Milan, Italy saw the highest number of ballots cast in a non-Arab country.
Roshdy anticipates those numbers will rise as people vote over the weekend. Runoff voting abroad will end on Saturday at 8 pm local time in each country.
Ahmed Ragheb, the ministry's deputy for consular affairs and head of operations, said balloting was regular and transparent.
He said the ministry provided diplomatic missions with equipment and staff to facilitate voting. The ministry receives daily updates from its embassies and consulates about the voting process and will get the final tallies from each polling station.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
